our old appendages are our contemplation of our peripheries.

these minor playthings we do not touch
anymore. rusting alphabets moored
to the toppling refrigerator door. we have always been the curious kind;

before the sun sets, stills itself in unperturbed solace, we the lonely hunters of ourselves sift the word
and the ordeal: the last aureole perishes
  and here flowers the nightly pulchritude.
our age are servitudes circling around
  with elliptical utterances. we have no crutch but our brittle bones slowly chiming in the music of something we
avoid: only too well a mercy we cannot
  bequeath nor receive.

  so breakable and false, this what we
do, these that occur permitting desires
  to speak blandly of themselves.
the hazards of the existing numerals
   and their foreboding syntaxes:
how we burn bright and fade out,
   all of this briefly shattering
after a colossal fall – its trenchant elegy
   repudiates with contrapuntal music.
eyes, the contraband of visions and
   stifled breaths reared in capitulations
like tailgating a beast on the tractable road
     to snare it to its death, yet untold.

slipshod toboggan feeling
before nakedness reeling
past dried vandals on walls
  colorway harum-scarum

entrails of blinded sides
  open to eyes and their
possible misconceptions

such that
baring all is showing less
and showcasing more
   is no other than pretension

going guillotine
sick or sane in one
asylum afloat
like flotsam there
  and jetsam here

   hoarded onomatopoeic
cacophony: street beat
  back to basic superstition—
no continuations or ellipses
   tell-tale that gamblers all
and losers swell, the jazz needed
   to synchronize in tune,
an off-beat gyration in split-screen
   flat affect. exeunt.

so many things wander
   in the night of the world - electric
  saw of the Hemiptera's wing uncertain
   of its path, or a hand like a beast
   in the ornate flesh, the sea of
undergarment with its saltine moistness,
limbless lips frittering onto squashed out
      softnesses that remember the fervor
  of grip or the pleasures of breathing after

     the tempest of beings,
   so many things in different placements
   displacing me here,
   savoring the impact just before the crunch of the bone,
   down to its last ache between the
    gnash of teeth and the miserly space
   of cerecloth to a body—

  they are many things trundling
   in the moment and i am just as much,
  yet a passing only, scouring the walls
   of graffiti emblazoning abstract unfathomably reachable and misunderstood, lost in ineffable translation — this doting darling
    contemplates death and
i understand now, going deeper
  as fish sinks into further blue,
wet with something else but water.

shine of light through the heavily draped mist

|naked|

i kneel to pick up the crimson and drain
  the thorns of your aches

|naked|

you screamed in your cornerless voice,
    the blue of the ocean peels through
     the foam and then

|naked|

like fish struggling in
      a flush of current, swaying with
  the drowned **** and the derelict
     of ships revealing old shadows

|naked|

as we took a dive in each
    other's depths clad with bravery, now

  |naked|

     to the bone, in fear of our clutched hearts, breaking in the silence,
     looking through the window
     of each other's deliquescent being
      sieving through the world,

|naked|

my frolicsome feet can only
imagine with their bones
the dream of what venture
requires me to go
farther to reach you.

it is with each step that
these passing trembles
conclude their premonitions.

it is when my hands wind-hover
in thick space that my mind
levitates itself and lifts to
draw with a shaking hand,
its own topography.

(x) is your place
      (y) is mine
   and somewhere in this
  haphazard equation is an
  algorithm that makes sound as
  all the circles are small
  without sides, and all shapes
  continue to break without form,
  encircling us now are the shards
  of this equation's
        fervent stridence.

   all of this is stellified
    without mind's authority -
only a heart's persistent longing
   and a trifle of courage,
  when these sordid amplitudes
    flounder to no swaying,
  there will be bridges for me
    to stride on so as to
  close the distances and
      silence the enigmas
  with their sought-for answers.

desultory moon
over Chrysanthemums tells
solitudinem.

Precision is everything. Bodies will be accounted
  with accuracy, one by one, and then all. Buried
  in the  chaîne opératoire.   Aplomb simmering
  in the sinews, cold as metal. Daylight will collect
  all that is disposed. Twilight will erase the monuments as cathedrals gorged, fat with prayer
   but before this, what impetus?

 Shot from the in-between, hip and pelvis.
     Surpass something from the peripheral:
 There are fugitives   conquering   secret places.
     Behind tense trees is the sought-for  enemy.
  Blinding light as   shot from  a hollow chamber
    the size of a dilated pupil: in a flash, 
             paraffin smearing   the  languid   visage.
   Hold   your   breath   and do   no harm
    to statistics.
               Nothing is  sure in   the   blotched minute.
    Stepping    on    bones    like  twigs,  names
        identical,   faces   disguised by    elements:    fire         as   sweat  and   blood.
         Air  pernicious   as   unheard   call for  mercy.
     This is   water:   the  one   who has  crossed
         the  river, close to   touching  the hand
      of   god.   Earth    a   trembling    grave.

      Words   roam as  should there  be  always
  in a  body, a  dazed  ornate  for a tractable  beast.
     You are here    for  passing. Prayer  is  intolerable,
    mind  the  sound  later  in newsprint. We  are
       the  same  muck   plastered   to stucco. It  rained
    ballistic  somewhere  between    the   sure-footed
         paper and   the   drawn line:

     They word it here as aletheia.
      The victims still unidentified.

In between,
     nonplussed   punctuations. Home  will  be  empty,
        if  not    for   candles. Carry   this   diadem
    across and    place  it  over the  helm of this
       broken   skull. Save   later   the  days for
     remember:  let  elegies perform nomenclature.

     Counterargument   was   day  if blinded
         by   intrusion. It has  happened,
    indelible.   Marked  by coordinates,  likened
    to   where  body parts  must be.  Unchallenged
       to  dismiss  the  derelict:  never to   return to
    geography.

          Dust on the ground.
          Rusted this  morning:  a bond broken into,
         the alloy  of an unknown   body
        breathing in the austere air of who   defied
            the incidental.
        It  will
     never     wear  off.    There
         is     only     reminder.

look what happens     in a speed like this
    85 on no freeway stalwart edifice of dark only trees like round tacks on square holes a dog on the road like a dead log
  
  look what happens   In a speed like this
   words or no words noise or silence
   sink or swim veracity or mendaciloquence
    little by little minced choices to
      marrow in bone without remains

  look what happens in a speed like this
    100 on no freeway pavement folding
   origamied shadow in a corner drenched
   in the pit of this dark dog on the road

   i ran him over

  look what happens in a speed like this
  so impeccably timed faster
  than a butterfly
  or a switchblade
  a shot of morphine
  a drugged-out drummer
  pummeling staccato beats
     or the unread word of the beatnik
  the dreamy dilettante

i ran him over
     dead, peabody in the cumbersome dark so small so small in a speed like this.

"No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt." - hunter thompson

but it did, Hunter.

and the silence grows fuller
like a plane to Nicaragua,
  or the sudden surge of quiet
   after two bodies have already
     fallen from the vertigo
      of pleasure.

   treading the barbed line of
    living as the wind acrobats
    and mangles itself into
     a dagger - a sharpest edge
     of memory's telling:
  
     i am endlessly searching
     for something i cannot name.

     scouring for lost things
     in the pocket of this
     realm. tentativeness
    a tenfold - sink or swim.
     mind dwindles somewhere caught
  like a flailing fly in the lair
    of a relentless tarantula.

furiously this night grows
    insectile in its habiliment,
  buzzing and drilling against the
   walls pounding on them like
a man would, angered and hostile
   behind narrowing faces of wall
    in steep confinement.

tiptoeing
     through shards
        fire
            song
              light
        ­         no light
                   silence.

this won't hurt
under secret strobe and
cigarette haze
this won't hurt
underneath the parasol of
influence as the cosmos rains
weighing down eyelids close to
pavement
this won't hurt
this won't hurt
won't hurt this,

won't this hurt

everyone else sleeps while this weather
takes a peculiar turn,

decides to chronicle with a mild kiss
of drizzle on the loam.

you did not know the name for
the mortal perfume of the Earth in the heat

of contrary figures but knew the nascent lunacy
of things and the dangers of their pursuit.

the gripping contravention holding things together,
a piece of the sun against the urban sky

and your apparition splayed as cold silhouette,
forced libation of Earth to soothe its machine,

sharp impressions accurate with details,
disseminate through the static conveyor of messages

the intact hieroglyph of your movement
in this odd weather.

Heed tetchy static, roving around McArthur.
I can feel the steady impulse breed flaxen flumine.
   Songs tumble notes as ladies sing blunt-mouthed tune.
You croon with them, mindless of the force that tries
  to break free past the console. Your voice is analogous
     to reticence. I hear nothing, feel everything underneath the lazy glow
of the sign that says Yield plastered to a decrepit signage past the
        posh city buoys of Jupiter. Everything comes to a halt
in the remote red light district. Somewhere behind those thick walls
   that enshroud the fumes of tantric body heat, I can feel the ground
    stop in that disconsolate delineation: morose and encumbered,
    outnumbered by the cognoscenti that filled the streets unwilling
  to give us directions to whereabouts we rarely have knowledge of.
   cigarettes rammed deep within their mouths, masticating the cloud
     of nicotine as though it were tender meat, I hear the radio go
      ballistic past the sign now that reads Exit.

wherever you go,
i go — wind tracing the child,
warm, outlined laughter;

the twilight-telling
bird of mid-flutter's lightness
erasing the night

and here is now, you
trilling amongst the ether,
moon shimmering bright.

in some paradoxes, space happens when two people
               are close but not close enough.

after hours of demand, the presence occurs in many ways.
ubiquitous objects rend the veil of vicariousness.
             there will be a repetition of days in here,
an assertive swing of dialogues to make ends appear as though
    real and accurate.

in a brief candleflame of silence on a Vietnamese restaurant’s rooftop,
    there will be noxious space conscious of: we are waning.
the way words leap from fences of teeth and venetian hairs.
        air becomes a fat mound of fools in arcades and then in an instant,
  it feels as if there is no more space left to move in, so they wear
     each other’s skin and shed right after the ballast’s fall.

   when done explaining a dream, sleep goes to belabor a bell.
soundless beside them, stiff as a body dreaming for itself.
   in some paradoxes, what is imagined is most real.
  there is suspicion that this lacks sentimentality. it is as carnal
and as commonplace as a hint of touch from a closed-in expanse.

  that time at the market when you had your hands fretting
for shapes of perfect fruits, taking them in your careful hands
wary enough to not beat them senselessly to the pulp of their
   glazed figures – the prices start to inflate and you wonder why
  people still remained when at the first sign of difficulty
       you   start   your   furlough.

     and also sauntering with maimed pace, that of autumn’s slow
reprieve, making your way past decrepit buildings,
   you stop to take sunsets not because they’re marvelous,
   but because you easily forget – and accept that there are
   also    things  wet under   the rain  and not with tears.

when in another paradox, things point to their source
when doused with oblivion – starting to breathe on its own,
occupying space
          leafing through days when   something instantly said
    rushes back   searching   for   its  holder,
              to  be   given,   stolen,   or say,
                                     left   to  die   on its   own –

i left the spigot dripping last night
and now the whole home is submerged —
archipelagic scraps of tatterdemalion
things line the floor like dead bodies
and poesy atrocities. but i have not
in mind, this disfiguring lament.

1     Take for example, a fine line
       darting towards your *******
2     And bend it towards the direction
       of genealogy or analogue fire
3     Henceforth commend contention
       and differentiate beyond hapless
       extensions of body to body
       mirror to mirror
4    Where all axioms define the universe
       and there is an epistemic
       afterthought looming past the
       arithmetic of things such is that
       of a steady punctuation mid-birth
5    Take the corporeal and eat Suns,
        thrash the Moon like how a bed
        is meant to be whacked by the
        spanked edge
6      Cold resuscitates flame and flares
        congeal all frigidity — or at least
        arbitrarily, remember it by whim
        caprice and then fade out
7      As misery clots in the same vein
        pulsing with different blood
        which we shall ensconce with
        laughter — a drunken hilarity
8      And then oppose the dictum
        that forced us to the point
        of recalcitrance, rousing hungered
        heat with memory of waking ice
9      Recount what I said about
        such opposites complementing
        each other in precise farce
10    In this exact exhibition faint
        upon recollections — going far
        inverse to poles only tells another
        distance covered by wide strides
        and a place nearly forgotten
        rekindled by newer ones.

the heat of an approaching story
(they have their own way of trickling
  your hands are hourglasses on the wooden table,
  the sands of whose sea you have shattered immensely
  with a single stroke of    recklessness)

it will be punctuated by the silence taken to the limit
   of a moment’s finite order
  (I dip my hands into the palms of useless glance
    waving heavily against the concrete lip of this dark
   intervening, standing in between as fury on the other side
   of the city is taken to the streets – barricades and men
        bawl into the fullest weight of the world,
     you said you   see all of it.)

and  will reach the lilt of   embrace,
  in all forms plundered of sentiments,
  all of it taken into the  air where

  I    see the final bird of dawn, flying
   and I cannot.

if love's the gaze of stone and hate
       the water drifting hands to their
   undreams of dreams, then it shall be
     with the zither of leaves a quartet of wind
        sifts inanimately so as dark as the night
    they will not dare speak the ineffable.

  if love's touch homing back to cities as
     spry as an unwound, delicate moon as
        can be, these flowerings drone
           exactitudes the rambunctious plunge
    of the roots to the Earth

                  and i will sing these delightful bursts called    days in 
    April have not the touch of frolicking birds
  and the quibble  of the masses half-opening
        and ultimately quivering are the mountains and the fish dance in the tumult
      of their aqueous variations

       it    is   April,  sing gently, as now all the
    leaves have fingers and  the ferruginous  rivers    have   feet   and   my love
            a   flower at   last!

o, life — you summon the compunction of
   our beforeness.

with your hands, you have worn me
  like a glove, tending to your footfall
  of soil.

with your voice, you poise the starkness
  of this bleak leviathan airlessness.
rousing the frogs sleeping in their
  fortresses — i give them no unction.

it is because life
        is a shard of glass surreptitiously
flattened out, shifting its balance,
   an obscure triangle. because life
is a rose of the old and my hands, a curious spry — i know not its thorns,
   only the dew that melds to dry.
because life has left me a youngling so old, groping in the beholden dark.

i recover no wholeness, and as i sit
in the middle of cobblestones,
the moon whetted to an inverse dagger,
  the blue of the sky like a cathedral
in twilight has its tremendous secrets
  revealed by lunar markings.

this is the voyage of the derelict;
scraps of paper twirling, blown by wind
from stars, the sodden aroma of the seaside — life, you are a sea and the waves unnerve the true blood of subterraneans.

paint me this picture, sonorous color
clutching the quiet ****

             pressed against cloying scenes,
        a loose hand bannering a bayonet.

rivet me waters, and much of the Earth
tightly groping inlands,

                thatched in the branch nowhere alone,
                is the song of God lullabying cities.

again the whole sky with its keen eyes
manifests a gleam worth knowing a cherub,

                 and sooner than it is later, when the seasons
    postpone their flamboyances, chiaroscuros of smoke,
   deceit, uncared for and unheard shrieks bounce off careless corners
    and the song of God is but static with little wings clipped
    and tossed into vicissitude:

song   or    no   song
bearing a fruition of attrition:

                    resounding far-away:  a comatose  of cars,
             a scuffle of powerlines, a melee of battlement and tranquil

continually     fluster the  child
   in  metronomic dance.

there is a way to part from
                   what separates us | converse issued
  by this curious distance |  toying with the
           proposition at sundown |  where to go
    when  you are home |  look at me across
          the eye and  see  copies

              true  breaking  in mirrors between
    shards  graphed  and  measured   go
           through me  you say  where   are  we  now
     that  we  have  gone?

        i  am  all  your   textures   shuffled  by
        hand    all  your  susurrus  folded   slid
        underneath    my   tongue   --  messages
        through a fusuma of teeth  piercing  air:
        breath mine to your  own mine  still  past
       clouds   in   dizzy   formations   head   northwest
        where  you belong, i sleuth  but  not demand
        an  opposite  of   presence, much palaver
       when it is thrown out in the  open  bare as
        a  shaved  beast
 
       how  does  a memory   walk   in  stilts
              past  cities   dreaming  impish
        with   a    proposal

      let      us      flee --

the ides stupor
leaning into the wall of this
grave sunset.

give me once again
your voice
your shy voice
like a banca
waiting for the moon
to sink below
its dome.

give me once again
your *******
your lithe *******
like genuflected hills
waiting for the sun
to sink below
its dome

give me once again
your being
your agile being
like wild horses
running into the sun
striding into the moon
waiting for me to sink
below your dome.

difficulties ascertain the tremor
of the displaced stone in the corner:

stones have truth, and life so much the not, like the lilt of mendaciloquence
dispersing in a dearth home—

everything else is rinsed,
assuaging the dermis that continually aches forever the thorn of a rose ripened,
  just as jazz is as always the music listened to by fellows hungry for Earth.
the wind blows spindrift past
our opened window when we slept next
to the churning sea. shadows renaming space: elegies of old metal rusting
seeking more than what silence provides.
roads confused to a kink. furniture kites along with it, a toppled light like sinking the fruit deep into the hands of a river.

  our flights become only so heavy
  when we become wary of the love we
  drag along. when we the small of our
  back and the bony protrusions of arched
  bodies become
            aware of the detritus. when blades
  of grass rear weight of the air bracing
  for the fall.
    
  our flights become only so heavy
   when we look back at our point
  of departures. our spanked curve
   of trajectories, permutations of
   open doors trying to do away
   syncopated tapestries anchoring
  our dripping bodies wet with what
  the snow has lent our
       numeral summers—

           forget.

we have fallen right
through the hurl
of this inner breaking.

    it is like we have collapsed
    into a twine of hands -
    spoken before the flowering
    of the twilight.
    we have awakened before
    the petalled corolla of the
    moon yields the peril of
    this void's statelessness.

in your eyes,
  so much in you is stellar.
  a florilegia of waxing images
   burning at the tip of this
    lunar flare, derailed from
   their orbits and left trundling
     in the vacuity.
in your eyes are the moon
   and the sun, the twist in
their shared iridescence,
   birthing out all your stars.

in that lightening moment I was stricken
   with a memory – quickening, swiftly, and then
deliberately: a bamboo in waiting yet akimbo,
    a sea unfazed yet stirring internally,
taking in the morning’s tremendous yawn
staring visibly, a thin line dividing soul and body,
    ephemeral and perpetual, vivid recall
and faint oblivion;

was it the wind that she borrowed with her
   presence or was it the breath that once stilled spring
like an invisible, yet felt river in my blood?
what impeccable maquillage was it that she donned,
      dawn or twilight?
something the silence waits with its mount on the boughs,
  the munificence of such plural modesty,
or everything the noise tell me which isn’t exactly
   but still is, a memory.

without words
and their wondrous servitude,
i would only be
and cease to become.

as in a forest,
i shall then continue to flower
in the sharpness of swan-song.
like a beast dazed
into nothing and its bafflements,
even the triviality of a lone stone
shall vagabond through me
in a thousand days that pull
downward, refusing to reveal themselves and their paradisiacal nuances. their etymologies
star their deaths to a languid crawl towards an empty page.

all words trapped, slurring
in the radiant void, unbecoming of themselves and who i am.
if i am to be without poetry,
my then epiphanies would be scaled down to an epitaph's weight and its proper terrors;
   to think that i cannot write anymore, weave anymore these words,
    reeks of deathlessness, and i,
  communing through the myriad dailiness of things shall exist only to be,
   and not become  ( as a single star is meaningless in the coruscation of the multitude - a constellation without moniker,
  a god rid of sobriquet,
as a carpenter without tools,
   orr an army without arsenals)
i am things vaguely not.

god forbid, if i am to be
  without poetry,
what will i become, unknowing of
its grave rescue? these marvels
shoot off in the temporal flight
   of this splendid fate, and if without words, then this shall only be, still afloat, a wild, directionless flight.

feet–dance–bounty–when–it–is
your–engine–that–sings–nondescript
music–shadows–left–wrung–out–of
drunk–in–dense–marshes–of–life;
your–gyrations–foretell–my–weight
as–in–the–home–of–verses—
strophe–by–strophe–endless–is–its
undulation–stamping—imaginations
two–fold–in–flounder—

it—is–like–you–are–deep–in–the–grass
and–the–wind–slurs–summer's–penitence.
    with–your–eyes–purely–the–tenseness
  of–days–like–dance–and–stillness
     meeting–at–the–edge–of–silence.

speak, also you—
the night is cut
and the moon is beheaded;

a mound of silence
collapses,
outlasting the lucid hymnal.
the clinking of glasses,
the guffaw of the gull trilling
  on no cypress.

god has meant locks
   and keys.

chiaroscuro is the form
   of oblivion, river is the voice
   of the dead: the throb of lure-call
  poised at the hollow of the hand,
    this evening.

there is a sadness that is drunk
   with something a lasting recall
   wuthers without a name:
the wayward moon hangs,
  the guillotine of stars
     spreads black blood on the tulip,

drinking as if there is no water,
    only that of wine and something
   that has brought us together,
     separated in the evening

our life, pithless against the wall,
     engraved there, unnavigable writ:
      sundered, washed ashore.

is this vacated cocoon
 a concatenation of a gradual
    obsolescence of a distinct
      machinery

    when it lulls me to sleep
 so obscured

   grip like vise, then lift as if
 passing a levitation
 
            submerges something
  in the throat
       rammed like inward canopy
   of hand, links like leaves and leaves like
       leaves still.

   paying hindrance to stasis
convolutes a mirror to steel and mangles
       the bile

    not minding me when i fall
asleep to its last, faint recall.

they took you now, contraptions no longer. there is a palpable quiet

      in the home. o lattice,
o vase of concrete, o smolder of onion
and the grave death of sugar;

the splintered staircase creaks
on no footwork and to go back to
cerements of this ceremonious banishment of shadow peals through
  gates opening to blue depths.

tonight, the room is as haunting
as old pangs. gnash the light of
moon past mud and linoleumed floor.
cross out my eyes and empty the
visage of their macabre.

   going back to tractable beginnings
as the bell tolls for no one:

  i stagger and startle the cornerless
  shadow, waking the orchestra of
  dogs to fracture the stillness

  like how drunken men curse at
  wives and throw vases against
  roses tossed to the dead.

  flesh warms no longer.
  garlands overwrought
  with serpents.

  glimmers of stone as dead
  as petrified oak.

  streets begin to narrow
  as light starts to pass on
  as answers.
  we make no sound.

You’re well-received in the Sun, this extraordinary Wednesday with nothing
  to do but to look out the window in transit and feel the breeze
  when it happens, that it takes a sojourn also – imagine it into form of all things
  gone wrong when love took its place.
  a linkage of all misguided features and ghosts, some travesties along the way
but it is all good once you bet on horses in burning stables, each eventual fall
  of hand into another hand – you see his, and sense a potential glower into
  detail. The patter of rain when it falls hard, and taking into account bodies
   flaying in unrestricted pace, breaking – when the impossibility of an immovable object
   meets
                   an almost impenetrable force or reckoning and no distance or collision was met,
  only retch at the volatility of the variables we have no use for
     such as love.

rinsing my flask, this late afternoon
and scouring to steal anything from my father's humble tavern: Chilean.

bought on stolen wine, this daze,
pacing itself carefully, as masterful as
a leering puma poised to strike

with a dull blade duller than stab-wound,
nobody heard this primal man cry in the
woods and i'm no dangerous man.

just a shadow that fits the sizable hands
of the world cupped, the afternoon is slain and the hue is its blood:

something the brush of the wind
sensuously brings a roulette of red
  blue, lavender, viridian,
plucked out of the vermilion
wading out as a debris forgotten waltzes
with the river underneath the kamagong— an answerless enigma amid all
    perplexities,

are we but nothing whilst we live?

her hand will be moonlight
by him: quietly

have we become beautiful
sound? movement of dancers

and fangs of music— birds
stirring elsewhere,

abandoning trees, you
and trilling waywardly across sound, me

all is disquiet in days your lips
have sung honeyed softness

i could hear it like a flower
whose petals are blue

deepening in silence.
her smile will be harlequinade

by him and an adagio of scherzo
by her will make feet trample

the accident of water: pond-strove
of love's bend asks

have we become rivers
leaping in temporal splendors

as when it will never
give sleep its ****** whiteness again

i sing through morning's trek
and we, deeper then rain-washed stone,

will be all but moon and dark,
oh, you, me — unclosed without protest

pressed against the wall
of love's domain.

(  to which temple shall our in-betweenness       kneel before

       reft in ****** dark?

   housed in parenthetical arms,
       graver than a tomb's rhetoric—

washed in red of flowers, a swarm
    of light arrives, waking the undeath
                                                      of stone.

  from glib strife to downpour of
    leaves — a morning unbound, unclose

the    sojourn     lay by the side of the
     river, the single-minded cruise


     to      appassionata,

                                       love.)

Thorns. It was all thorns, this thing of a hand, making its way,
swirling across the small of my back. We are here again. In this
working of the way, trying to make some sense out of our
elicited absurdity; Names. We are both made of them.
Some take a toll in our bodies and mostly turn themselves,
a parting wave, or a hinge that does not work – closes all stalls,
the thumping on the walls, and then some indifferent silence
penetrates the two of us: aberration. We are here again, trapped
inside this console. Our tabulated quotients do not rear the best
of our equations. Now there is distance in such short space that could
hold no less than a matchflame, or a little hummingbird, prying open,
the leaf that turns with us in the ground. The rapture of freedom
does not enclose me. Like a shuddering blade of grass bowing down
to the perpetrating rain, I am within arm’s reach with the stones that
refuse to give out answers. We have burned the bramble. Our buds,
of no use. The wind blows, and that is it. No solace. Taking time
to sojourn deep into something we both know as a standstill,
a petrified tree at the bend of the road, or this  undeniable thing
                  that asks for a different name: love,      something torn.

How i found you frozen in this city
but not desolate. You have everything
else tethered to a string -- pull, fathom, decree
    it yours. Say when to stop, but not falter.
Push yourself over the edge none to break
   the fall but you. When sensations reach
 for the viscera, choose not to break.
 Coagulate like shattered glass in the banquet,
 labor as it were forced by default. Resign
 under makeshift places we haven't slept yet. A couple

          of  accidents made of yourself, some familiar
 things brought over supper. Your father will smile
 at the completed sight of you. Your mother I saw
 picking fresh apples from the stand, your face
 this evening juxtaposed to the many lights of
 this city. Yourself would manifest a pavement,
        stretched like a corpse I sleep in the gutter.
From the city which I found you what else
      are we but to wane.
   We   curve    in   this   curve. Let me  finish
 bent   as  small as  a question  mark starting
 
   with   perhaps:  perhaps they meant it
       perhaps they  saw it  coming
   perhaps it   was  i not  you
            perhaps  it is  morning and  birds spry
    everywhere   speaking.  perhaps it was you outside the  rain   burning

                    ending, concatenative else it was
        merely I trying to explain   to  a  grievous fault.

i am the father of these words yet,

these mischievous children
run away in the loquacious dark
chasing lithe-clothed, supple-limbed
girls whirling up and about the prairie
of these versifications without home
     in mind or remembering —
(the home of my mind wary of
the past and its old cobwebs,
or the slaughter of ordinariness
with a dull blade poised to cull,
these mindful creatures assassinating
diaphanous muses disrobing themselves,
serpents shedding their integuments.)
   oh and when they return home sullied,
after a day's squalid scamper past
  the muck, the twitch of atmosphere,
    the horizon ladled with clouds
  in white metamorphosis, i remove their
  clothes and send them to the fences of sleep — impish dream-callers,
  yes I am the father of these words
and they flourish, swelling up, learning
   to harangue their own father, sending
    him to borderless retreat.

was exhumed by stern-faced defeat
as all others revel in victories.
i only watch the limpid light
slowly frittering back to its
console as the barkeep hands me
my 7th beer of the night

as i handed them the first defense
of the inveigling tactic i have yet
to put them through and send their
young minds to equipoised trial.

i have felt ears poor without
understanding but the welcoming warmth of the light shone against
my already bleared body pierced
through the unclear of words,
as i read them littlest of
my far-slung poems, bardic
and resolute yet rogue upon sound
thinly hanging, barely on a spindle of plaudit.

the barkeep bestows me my 8th bottle and i have felt some
slow ease encroach me with lighter burnt retreat,
as i left,
unfinished.

i.
on such frigid atmosphere lay,
a serene fugitive.

do not look at me with such lithe eyes:
the sepulcher is only starting
       to begin.

your sleep's regimen twice-folds
origamied on the quiet cloister,
hang there, puts to test the unblinking
certainty of we who bear no retrieval.

ii.
remember when
    all the fish you gut and all the *****
      you cleave were all but meaningless
       fill?

a mutiny of stench is released,
as men continually purged you of
your poisons — us mortised to this
vague mandate.

i have wished for them to miss the mark.
i have longed for them to mime only
  but your placid face.
they have ransacked the quarry of flesh
  flashed bare against mirrors riveted
   to split-seconds of hours.

iii.
when i was young,
much sleep was needed — a noonday travail to all fretting but a dream of dogs.

now this thump of quietness
may mean no recovery.
the speculations to gnaw for sleep are
lost in a blink of an eye:

the blanket that once smelt of camphor
now engulfs in a single blast of cerement.
        — this scrap of a thing that we
             almost have no use for.

iv.
a furious consideration of roomfuls
   disallowed by a heady ruling of
   emotion's precision.

that, of the most difficult choices—
knowing where to fecundate rest.
your body heeds
            no metaphysical reckoning.
  the preordained space for you to occupy, this unwanted silence that keeps
   on renaming things we cease to forget.
a sentence seized by a clause of wood.

  all too soon to wave as a single beat
  is thrown a hundred ripples into my
  eyes, dragged along and trundling there,
     left lengthening to leave, never to wait.

not with time, nor with a touch we choose
to contest — but an eyeing space,
   a moment to attract transience.

v.
i will only look at you once — lacquered
   with solace.

no ellipsis of breath could continue you.
no paragraphs would forgo of your
   punctuations. i deny my defeat
against one who brooks with victory.

    no hint of other chroma.
    a chiaroscuro of beating petals,
   left only to thrive and not swing
    with verdurous display.

how to tell if this is true?
i touch myself as words gyrate
  in the room that received your body
  like the lighthouse that feeds the sea.

—  or maybe sheathed with the untruth.
  this enigma yields no revelations.
  too late to ring yet still continuing on,
    an early drop of dew.

"when you cannot sleep at night,
you are in someone else's dream"

how many hours shall descend
bringing in a cavalcade
of dim twilight's press
  on the soft, aqueous levitation of body?
is this liminality's gradual
hand nailing me
into flesh and stirring
me out of this oceanic crawl
when all you have ever
done was sleep me away
and tell me
of these
susurrations of soul?

i have no answer to
this solitary condition -
say, taking you by the hand
and somnambule in cosmic field
of no thought's ethereal working,
or as in playthings are freely
laughing behind whose hair
flails without a face, i wonder
which beauty holds true,
my wide wakefulness,
like the only key pursuant
to its inimitable hole.

i am infinite in someone's
thinking, who dare not
say something,
who daunts back to breathless
consoles, and springs back
dizzy with a gyro of questions,
  i am all hunted answers but
  where
  is the votive voice
  that searches me?

next onset of such peril,
   be much the silent as though concentration
   of stone – have your say, yet the susurrus
   wills your anchored voice.

finer: knowable as a book is opened and a leaf
          is turned, a star: to exact how it is to float
   deep in the celestial of your body’s ample universe,
    and take the milk of the nebula,
      for mine to drink in this silence whose dress
is white and not   blue, or anything the coruscation sings
   hewn tenderly, swelling in the wandering of words:
   whose ambitions are no less than the swell sheen
    of the borrowed moon, and greater it is than
   it shall be the only thing timid like light underneath
     the fleeting of the shade that has been stripped and
  coursed you on, naked:

  yet my hands bequeath you enough the shade,
and slowly in you persists the evening
  full not of stars that lowered themselves to
    the penetralium but of all time has erected the
day,  the twilight  and your obvious darkness.

entering the gradual hour,
this wraith without announcement,
without wreathe, without the
song of bells nor the fracas
of cathedrals.

are you always like this?
have you already deciphered
the enigma imbued on the twists
of our roads? have you already quieted the anthem of emptiness?

when silence befalls you, do you trill on the same bough after your tired flight? with what weight of water do you scrunch the already dampened foliage? outside windows and all openings there is only the old moon's wane, and in this uniform exactitude, do you speak what remains to be said? what are only these words that remain so small in us? why have we not foreseen their deaths?

why must you go in the irretrievable dark and emerge with
only scarce light? why must now your languid bones rattle underneath the ground of this formlessness and speak to me the languages i conceive on my own
and not from your once brazenness?

before your rigor was the sibilant stridence of your once wry smile.
we cannot find it in us anymore,
and somewhere yet again, inside of us, rallies still with its mayday and its warfare,
something only a shadow could
only ***** in the total dark.

out for no nursery of accolade.
i am trying to sound my way
into a great mishap.
wing me the streets of all and i shall
give back their names to their fathers.

taut as a gun is held,
these words wield their unapologetic
assaults.

the next face i see will be the victim,
and it will be ******.
the discombobulated moon
gloats without a price tonight.
the white hand of it sees a figment of solace, rumples it,
disconcerts a votive clearing
reducing it to a bawl of
a windswept tumble of leaves.

i am now in front of the machine;
its salutary silence, its waiting groans,
its orchestra of trite gears slamming
the ornate of words and cutting
the stem of the flower that once
hurt me with its beauty,

i see your face
in this mound of havoc.
the pain of marvel's presence,
inclemencies of longings

everything takes space and trembles
  in its place.

flayed shade      of peril

         i
           gaze
   into
          the
     sky
        be it night
or
      day,
          and look
   for something

      i know not,
even the moon
         and the sun
     are famished

     and
         that is
why i still
       keep
     on
            looking...

your home filled with vines does not know
it is alone — it seeks to become a diaphanous fold of trees, a violent vermilion of skies crushed to clay.

its arms hold refuge, a delicate heart.
the formless shadow there and the unguessed sensorium of furniture —
they do not know the touch of ruin.

underneath you, i am.
soil crumbled by the hundredfold of your
weight. in the air singes the burning of days, punching a hole onto me like
a globule of diminutive fire rife to
cull the vineyard of my body.

your home does not know
the dream of its weight. the anchor of its pillars gnash the acidulous trifle of hours.
doors, windows, cupboards still — every aperture gorges itself with the water
of your footsteps.

your home does not know
that it stomps stonily against an earthen fruitage: my body beaten to a pulp.

do you remember one
     morning when it rained,
  chrysanthemums then lined the streets
  and each petal whirred to the sound of your passing?

you were too, a flower
in my hand. deep underneath the ground
you murmur, letting the twilight darkle
   into twinight. it was the dawn of your becoming.
the sky’s panging brought you here.

you suddenly filled all the mouths
that waited for you, with the marine of your name.
because we were joined by haunts that revisit us
  in this river of life
and that is why the unperturbed stone,
    the incongruent leap of water,
the bodies that sprucely lay adrift with the fluminous ways
      of the world all know you and i
because we are but from one source
    surrounding them in their laughter and silence
when we are apart as though
  they cannot sing when we do not make music
  they cannot wake when they darkly wait for us
  in their homes, trembling with unlit lamps of dust and sleep
  they cannot lift in the moonlight when we strip
  them of their fear
  as though they cannot love in the midst
      of spring when we are but two separate leaves
falling endlessly – finding each other in the Earth.

he wipes his glass clean
she wipes his glass clean
his  glass   hers
  to see    in
       the fold of   her   being
she   sees   to it  all clearing;

  and things to fulmination
committing a steady ******   into
   the   silence, this   afternoon

I think to   myself

   wardrobes  tossed
hers,      somewhere there,   in oblivion
    temporary,   absolute,
  zeroed in, sexed up against   walled-up contention

  our  legs  a tribe
of   hounds,   our   fingers
     feathering  light    through   his   glass
  she    wiped   clean
     with       her      emissions
                           eyes    wide   as morning

somewhere by a mountainside,    horses
   ride   into    the Sun
and he   thinks    of  
      repetitive  lapping    of   floundered  waves
to    bite shore
   and she   thinks   herself

           a    verse     punctuated
open    still
           to  
                        revisions

a finagling
       conception

faces start to blur
past dreary old Manila
and scaffolds cool to touch
like one of the many daggers
of love struck relentlessly
against the rib
mercilessly genuflect
as the rain mocks
the tears of a woman used bone-deep
wolfing down at the door
heeding these transcendental howls

baleful eyes ****
past the throb of the strobe

remain wordless

i taste it in the moment
yet why kneel?

silence, an immense room
        then so suddenly obscene.

memory clings longer than imagined –
I say this in hours where I touch you
   not with hands, fret you not with fingers,
kiss you not with lips but with words prying open
with gestures which unwound us ever so softly,

I unsay your memory shorter than it was held
far beyond what spring embraces solemnly inward,
     that in light structure of night you will be wholly made

true in calmness what the tremors of my home
        unravel with little dints of December keen with
   its thrall,

touchingly you

      without a flounder of breath or an ounce of caress,
  are still written here, like the world answering
           for our questions –

warm of sun through percolator cloud
      waft of wind stale, flat on surface
  all-fours;
   mezzotint of sky blooms like an aged flower across the skirt of the dawn
     lingering the acrobat hurtling
across hideous moonlight.

   there is an exhausted sundial
in the feeble aurora. one Wednesday
   yet all too many a day, tumble
of the calendar and the pompous talk
    of clammy water over the pockmarked
streets from yesterday's surfeit rain.
    
i enter the hellish car fostering
   the sun's fervor in the subcompact
like a tiny universe, constellations of
    sweat on my forehead, a crumpled
  carton of Marlboro in my pocket
   whiff of dried leaf clinging to finger
     this formidable silence across
      the lounging Mahogany, on the road
treading homeward — caught in
     wave of the next moment,
    underneath the rain of a once tear
shed facing walls slouching towards
  despondent sheets and scrunched body;
claimed whoever sees the
    face of indelible yesterday, tremulous aspen tree dressed with cicatrices of old,
  birds unraveling incarnadine wound from
     upheaval of scabs, disheveled dog
  naked without any reason at all,
         weak in dog-joints and reeking
in dog-flesh carrying on his back the
   supremacy of the sun,
  
i too, here, homebound and downtown
    sings sleepy the reveille,
   bridging the darkness there
    letting in all aches and dangerous
  playthings for strange men, open

   the gates, mother, the pearl
of detergent I smell, in my hands shaped
     cleverly, the rust of gate
and the saw-tooth music grating the
   afternoon frightened and small,
resigned to bed; dark's afterthought.

Your reluctance to bark, your canine ogling. How I envy you dog. Because you are innocent.
      Because you dawdle in your
        coil of tonal mane.
Because you weep no deaths.
Because you somersault no beginnings.
Because you do not heed the call of silence — just stupidly beautiful curiosity you cannot word, a scruff grunt or a maniacal burst of motion. Because you only
    find yourself in a ***-lock
and drowse right after.
Because there is nothing in this
     world too immense for your
   smallness. Tottering behind the furniture, sleeping underneath
        the study, wagging your tail vehemently, welcoming with beastly pounces any stranger heralded by the wind passing
     through opened doors,

because you have no daily commute,
     no dread for the inevitable,
  because your fruitions are measured to no better than
  a toss of supplication or simply
gnawing at an old bone.

   Because tomorrow
i will go to Pasay and earn a living
for perhaps, nothing— my works remain unread, my voice
     still dies in its reticence, if not clubbed state.
   Because tomorrow there
will be a long line of people running
     in circles on the head of the
  nail and soon it will rain.

Because you and I share
     the same air yet never
  carry the same iron of crosses
     or surmounts of ineffable
  boulders — i feel more chained
     without a leash while you
   feast in the manna of hours,
chasing a speck of shadow
      or lounging at every time-trickle.

Jakarta, 2016*

some say the city is stippled with warnings
but nobody took the time to stop and sojourn deep
  into the augur – there was no price to pay
and no song to be sung. only strange silence trying
to renounce the inscrutable weight of peril;

but a while ago, the tabloids and the papers are
dizzy with tribulations – each word assumed not sound
  but force. the once Decembering wind transmogrified into
a penitent squall of smoke until the city was of a veiled mother
    weeping behind the pretense of a shadow.

not much was said, or perhaps we were speaking
  for such a long time, or we did not mean many things
but wounds and cuts and some lostness to which we all have
  gone blind and deaf: coming in daylight’s whisper.
   we cannot hear. all of which may not be revealed, like
a new phrasing that has not been conceived yet, and so we lay
   in the silence for now, hushed by surrounding scenes,
               in pursuit  of heart.